Zetabyte Filesystem (ZFS) Released

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SUMMARY

ZFS has been officially integrated into the Solaris Express: Community Release b27a, marking its transition from a promised feature in Solaris 10 to an available filesystem. This 128-bit filesystem offers advanced capabilities such as compression and is positioned as a strong competitor against Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM). ZFS is open source and free, encouraging users to explore Solaris. A demo by Dan Price on OpenSolaris.org showcases ZFS's features, and users are advised to check hardware compatibility before installation.

PREREQUISITES
  • Understanding of Solaris Express: Community Release b27a
  • Familiarity with ZFS filesystem architecture
  • Knowledge of hardware compatibility lists for Solaris installations
  • Basic skills in filesystem benchmarking and performance comparison
NEXT STEPS
  • Research ZFS performance benchmarks against other filesystems like ReiserFS4 and XFS
  • Explore the features of OpenSolaris and its community resources
  • Learn about the installation process for Solaris Express: Community Release b27a
  • Investigate the implications of 128-bit filesystems in modern computing
USEFUL FOR

System administrators, developers interested in advanced filesystems, and anyone evaluating Solaris for enterprise storage solutions will benefit from this discussion.

graphic7
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As of today, ZFS is now a part of the Solaris Express: Community Release b27a. ZFS, originally, was promised to be part of Solaris 10; however, the initial release had to be pushed back. We'll see ZFS integrated into Solaris 10 with the second update, that's probably due next year some time.

ZFS, without a doubt, is the most advanced filesystem -- definitely more advanced than XFS, JFS2, etc. ZFS is a full 128-bit filesystem that supports compression, and will give the Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) a run for it's money. Did I mention that since ZFS is part of OpenSolaris, so it's open source and free?

Hopefully, this will persuade more of you to give Solaris a try.

Dan Price, at OpenSolaris.org, has written a short demo in Flash that illustrates just how awesome ZFS is:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/demos/basics/

Edit: I just finished downloading the SXCR b27a ISOs, myself, and I'm about to do an install on my i386 workstation.

The ISOs for SXCR b27a may be downloaded at
http://javashoplm.sun.com/ECom/docs/Welcome.jsp?StoreId=7&PartDetailId=Sol-Express_b27-x86-SP-G-B&TransactionId=try

Be sure to check out your hardware is on the Hardware Compatibility List before doing an install:
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data/sol/
 
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Who in there right mind needs a 128-bit filesystem? Did I miss the announcement concerning mainstream quantum computing?

From the demo it seems as if Sun has basically lumped a bunch of tools into one. It is nice from a management perspective, but how is the performance compared to say ReiserFS4?
 
dduardo said:
Who in there right mind needs a 128-bit filesystem? Did I miss the announcement concerning mainstream quantum computing?

From the demo it seems as if Sun has basically lumped a bunch of tools into one. It is nice from a management perspective, but how is the performance compared to say ReiserFS4?

Sun (or anyone else for that matter) has yet to do a benchmark between all the major filesystems. From the demo, though, you did see that 100 filesystems were created in 20 seconds.

Obviously, you're going to run into issues when you try to accruately benchmark a filesystem only available on Solaris, against filesystems that are only available on Linux, though. So, until ZFS gets ported to another platform (most likely to FreeBSD, as it can't be ported to Linux and officially integrated into the kernel sources), you won't have an accurate benchmark to cite.

Edit: I've talked with a few guys at Sun and a feature-wise comparison between XFS, Ext3, and ReiserFS3 (maybe 4) is on the way.
 
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